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Invisible Monsters

Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters tells the story of how bitterness and family resentment can eat you alive. Palahniuk introduces us to Shannon McFarland who survives a brutal gun shot wound to the face. The face that she made her living off of as a model. The face that defined her life.

We witness her bitterness at life, her friends, and her family in a tale that interweaves her past and present until everything comes together at the end. Along her journey we meet Brandy Alexander, a beautiful woman in the middle of her journey from having a man’s body to completing her surgical transformation. Brandy enters Shannon’s life when she needs someone separate from her former life and Brandy takes that role with enthusiasm. They travel around the Pacific Northwest stealing and numbing their life with a lot of drugs.

The story and the characters are not laid out nice and neat at the beginning of the book. Palahniuk sucks the reader in but doesn’t divulge much information and the reader must wait for all the surprises to be revealed. Looking back I was amused at how much foreshadowing there really was, but Palahniuk writes so well that it was neatly hidden in the story and it wasn’t until after I read the book that I realized he had put so much into the back stories to foreshadow the end.